Asus Vivobook Pro 15 (2025) review: a solid midrange 15-inch performer

If you’re a creator or a gamer, you’ll want a laptop with a larger display. The best 15-inch laptops include a bunch of great choices with fast CPUs, GPUs, and awesome displays. Asus recently introduced the 2025 Vivobook Pro 15, which serves as a reasonably affordable machine for this target market.

The Intel Arrow Lake chipset is very fast for churning through productivity tasks and creative applications, and the discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 GPU is entry-level but still provides solid performance for video editing and midrange gaming. And it’s available a reasonable price with a spectacular OLED display.

Specs and configurations

Right now, the one configuration of the Vivobook Pro 15 that’s available in the US is $1,500 for an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H chipset, 24GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, a GeForce RTX 4050 GPU, and a 2.8K OLED display.

That seems like a reasonable price for a laptop that can handle some moderately demanding creative tasks and act as a midrange gaming machine. It’s definitely a premium price, but many lower-powered 15-inch machines are just as expensive.

Design

I’ve spent some time recently reviewing several Apple MacBooks, and the Vivobook Pro 15 suffers from that comparison. As far as I can tell, the chassis is constructed of plastic while the lid is metal. It’s rigid enough, but after handling the all-metal MacBook Air 15, I have to admit that the Vivobook Pro 15 feels a little less robust. It’s well enough built, but it’s easy to discern the difference.

When you compare the two laptops, the MacBook Air 15 is much thinner at 0.45 inches versus 0.78 inches and lighter at 3.3 pounds versus 4.19 pounds. But, the Vivobook Pro 15 does have a discrete GPU inside, even thought it’s entry-level, and is has a robust thermal design to move a lot of air while the MacBook Air 15 is fanless. We’ll see later how that impacts performance. If we compare to the more powerful MacBook Pro 14 with the very fast M4 Pro or M4 Max chipset, we have a laptop that’s still thinner at 0.61 inches and lighter at 3.4 pounds. Even the MacBook Pro 16 is thinner at 0.66 inches, although it’s heavier at 4.7 pounds.

Aesthetically, the Vivobook Pro 15 is all-black (except for some keyboard accents) with bold lines and aggressive venting. It sort of borders on a gaming aesthetic without any RGB lighting or gamer colors, and it still looks pretty aggressive. If you want a conservative laptop, that’s not this one. But it’s not the most ostentatious design I’ve seen.

Keyboard and touchpad

The keyboard includes a numeric keypad, which is less common today and which forces a slightly cramped layout. I’m not a fan on a 15-inch laptop that doesn’t have enough extra space to fit one in. On this one, it makes the keycaps too small, and I found myself having to check where my fingers were when typing this review. That’s unusual lately. The switches are fine, although slightly spongy. The gray color scheme for the special keys on the left and right come across as merely distracting.

The touchpad is mechanical, and it’s large enough. The button clicks are confident and responsive, but a little loud. Asus includes its DialPad, an embedded controller that matches up with software to provide specialized functionality for apps like Adobe’s Creative Suite. It’s a convenient feature that works well enough.

There’s no touch display, which I do prefer to see on Windows laptops. Most people won’t care, I’m guessing.

Webcam and connectivity

There’s a 5MP webcam, and it provides good enough image quality. There’s an infrared camera for Windows 11 Hello facial recognition, and that works well. The Intel Arrow Lake chipset doesn’t have as fast a Neural Processing Unit as (NPU) as its Lunar Lake lineup, coming in at 13 tera operations per second (TOPS) compared to the 40 TOPS required for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC AI initiative. Faster on-device AI processing will have to be provided by the RTX 4050 GPU, meaning it won’t provide the same kind of efficiency but might be faster overall than a Lunar Lake laptop with integrated graphics.

There’s a nice selection of ports, with just one Thunderbolt 4 port but good legacy support. The power adapter is proprietary, which means that you get enough power to support the full 125 watts that can be fed to the CPU and GPU. It’s a larger power brick, however, meaning you’ll be carrying around some extra weight. That does leave both USB-C ports (one without Thunderbolt 4) available for use while plugged in. Wireless connectivity is one generation behind, which won’t matter for a few years while Wi-Fi 7 rolls out.

Performance

The Vivobook Pro 15 is built around the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H chipset for 2025, which is a member of the Arrow Lake generation and uses 16 cores (six Performance, eight Efficient, and two Low-Power Efficient) and 16 threads. It runs at up to 5.4GHz, and consumes a base of 45 watts of power. Asus built in the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 GPU, which is an entry-level discrete GPU that’s significantly faster than Intel’s Intel Arc 140T integrated graphics that are built into the chipset. The RTX 4050 can use up to 115 watts, while the Asus power system provides up to 125 watts total — meaning that the CPU must be powered down a bit to maximize graphical performance.

Asus has built in an impressive thermal system that uses its IceCool Pro technology with five heat pipes, dual 12V fans with 103 Ice Blades each, and expelling hot air through three dedicated vents. In my testing, the fans did spin up and were loud, but not as loud as many gaming machines I’ve tested. Overall, I think Asus did a good job of squeezing out the best performance from both the Core Ultra 9 and the RTX 4050.

That performance is reflected in our suite of benchmarks. Compared to the MSI Prestige 16 that we tested with the same Intel chipset, the Vivobook Pro 15 was faster in all but the Geekbench 6 multi-core test. It’s also faster than the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chipset in the Asus ProArt PX13. The RTX 4050 was much faster than the Intel Arc 140T graphics in the Prestige 16, and slightly faster than the ProArt PX13’s RTX 4050 in our synthetic benchmarks.

That makes the Vivobook Pro 15 very fast for demanding productivity tasks, and the RTX 4050 is generally good for moderate 1200p performance in modern titles, as long as you turn the graphics down a few notches. It won’t break any gaming speed records, but it’s a good midrange gaming option. Note that it matches up well against the M4 chipset in the Apple MacBook Air 15, but it falls way behind the MacBook Pro 16 with the M4 Pro chipset.

Just as important, given the Vivobook Pro 15’s creator emphasis, is its performance in the Pugetbench Premiere Pro and Photoshop benchmarks. Both of these run in the native Adobe applications, and provide a good idea of how laptops will be able to run more demanding creative tasks like video editing. In Windows in particular, this benchmark benefits greatly from a discrete GPU.

The Vivobook Pro 15 scored well in each test, particularly for a laptop with just an RTX 4050. It fell behind the ProArt PX13 in Premiere Pro but was faster in Photoshop. Interestingly, it was also faster with some laptops with faster RTX 4060 and RTX 4070 GPUs, demonstrating that the Intel chipset has some optimizations to go along with its faster speeds.

These aren’t the highest scores I’ve seen in these benchmarks, but they’re good enough that they’ll meet the needs of moderate creative workflows.

Battery life

There’s a 75 watt-hour battery but also some fast components and a high-res OLED display. Those aren’t the best combination for long battery life with a 15-inch laptop.

Unsurprisingly, battery life was pretty poor. I saw just 7.5 hours of video looping and five hours of web browsing. That falls well short of some other new Windows laptops running Intel’s Lunar Lake and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chipsets, which can last twice as long or longer. It’s also considerably less than the MacBook Air 15 and MacBook Pro 16, which can get three times the battery life. But, it’s in line with other laptops with discrete GPUs aimed at these kinds of tasks, none of which get great battery life.

This is a laptop you’ll want to use when plugged in. If you decide to take it on the road, make sure you’re not doing anything demanding or that you have your (rather large and heavy) power supply in your backpack.

Display and audio

The Vivobook Pro 15 is built around a spectacular 15.0-inch 16:10 2.8K (2880 x 1800) OLED display running at 120Hz. It looks great out of the box, with bright, dynamic colors and OLED’s usual inky blacks.

According to my colorimeter, this is as high-quality an OLED display as you’ll find. It was bright at 410 nits, well above our 300-nit baseline, and it demonstrated perfect blacks with a contrast ratio of 28,640:1. Its colors were extremely wide at 100% of sRGB, 97% of AdobeRGB, and 100% of DCI-P3, with excellent accuracy at a DeltaE of 0.83 (less than 1.0 is indistinguishable to the human eye).

Simply put, you’ll love this display no matter what you’re doing. If you’re a creator, the display matches up well with the performance. Audio doesn’t quite match up, though with downward-firing stereo speakers that are just okay for YouTube videos and systems sounds. For anything, use a good pair of headphones.

A solid large-laptop choice for moderately demanding users

The Vivobook Pro 15 2025 doesn’t break any speed records for a 15-inch laptop, but that’s okay. To get much faster, you’ll have to spend a lot more money — and you won’t necessarily get as spectacular an OLED display.

It’s fast enough for the most demanding productivity users, can keep up with moderate creativity workflows, and play modern titles at 1200p with decent graphics. For $1,500, that’s a pretty good deal. My biggest gripe is the plastic construction, but that’s no reason to overlook the Vivobook Pro 15.